There came a sturm und drang-y time in the nation when the old myths, tales, and dreams no longer applied for 99 percent of the people.

And so, the great mass of people gnashed their remaining teeth and cried out for help, pleading and beseeching into all corners of the land, seeking a new champion to set things right -- to have new stories constructed, which would then help the People survive their overly restrained and heavily-regulated lives at the hands of a cruel and unjust emperor, called the President.

So far, the conversation about real extremism in America has been underwhelming, ranging on the low side of things, pinging in the ones and twos on the Overall Awareness Meter.

Such is the reward when focusing the energies and efforts of all hands, and all eyes, on the ugly, snarling surface issues espoused by extremists. If you trick people into noticing only the incoherent policies and speeches made by your candidate right now, however crazed or crass they may be, you can get these same people to blow past the lowest-gravity spots where previously inconceivable thoughts and verbalizations really start to bubble and bake.

Wonderful. We've managed to get through another set of political conventions.

Frankly, this is tantamount to celebrating a fleeting victory over jaundice, a temporary flare-up of malaria, or an ongoing resurgence in hemorrhoids.

If I didn't know better -- and I'm not sure that I do, not anymore -- I'd say someone slipped some blotter-paper acid, or mind-warping alien spores, into my preventively-medicated, yeast-enhanced beverage.

Of course, it could also be that the candidates themselves have divvied up the hallucinatory goods, right before each one got off their respective Gravy Trains, for their respective stops at Podiumville.

Newt Gingrich crawled onto Fox last Thursday evening and proclaimed to his boy-toy Sean Hannity that he had lost his fucking mind by saying, "Western civilization is in a war, We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in Sharia, they should be deported. Our forces should be used to systematically destroy every Internet based source, and frankly if we can't destroy them through the Internet, we should destroy them with kinetic power using various weapons starting with predators and frankly just killing them.”

Not to be out-crazied, Bill O'Reilly and Donald Trump agreed that it's not just isolated ISIS attacks anymore because “we” are now in a World War.

The saying, What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas is the condensed version of:

Every year people go to Las Vegas, and the billions of dollars they lose gambling … stays in Vegas.

The house has a built in advantage on all the games. The gambler who plays long enough … will lose. The Smart Gambler plays the games with the smallest House Edge like Baccarat or Craps. The Idiot Gambler goes straight to Keno or the slot machines. But lowering the odds doesn't mean you are going to win. It just means you might win some of the time, but overall you'll lose more slowly.

For anyone driving through the American countryside before 1963 there was a good chance they'd see a series of six signs spaced along the side of the road written to entertain and promote the sale of Burma Shave “brushless” shaving cream.

Here's one of the last set of signs from 53 years ago:

We don't

Know how

To split an atom

But as to whiskers

Let us at 'em

Burma Shave

The Burma-Vita company's original product was a liniment made of ingredients described as having come from "The Malay Peninsula and Burma." Sales were poor until the company hit upon the road sign advertising gimmick, and at its peak, Burma-Shave was the second-highest-selling brushless shaving cream in the United States. But now those quaint little signs of Americana are as dead as Dodo Birds.